A mobile device requires the establishment of a radio access bearer in order to communicate with the wireless network infrastructure. Furthermore, some devices allow the establishment of multiple radio access bearers for communications. In one instance, multiple radio access bearers can be dependent on the device requiring multiple packet data protocol (PDP) contexts. Thus, for example, a device may have a proprietary PDP context for the manufacturer of the device, a general wireless application protocol (WAP) context for browsing, a multimedia messaging service (MMS) PDP context for MMS applications, a streaming media PDP context for streaming media applications, among others. As will be appreciated, a PDP context is a term that is generally referred to in the third generation partnership project (3GPP) and more generally the term “tunnel” is used herein to refer to a data connection to a particular network.
Various networks or network conditions may determine how many tunnels can be opened between a device and the network. The number of tunnels that can simultaneously be open on the device is called a “watermark”.
The watermark for a network may change over time. For example, during a peak traffic period the watermark may be set to one to limit the amount of data traffic. However, in an off-peak period, the watermark may for example be set to three, meaning that three tunnels may be open between a mobile device and the network.
The setting of the watermark at the device may lead to the device using the setting until the radio is cycled. Therefore, if the mobile device sets the watermark to one during a peak period, it may be unable to utilize three tunnels in a subsequent non-peak period.